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list price: $125.00
edition:Hardcover
also available: eBook
category: Literary Collections
published: Mar 2003
ISBN:9780773525160
publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press

Imagined Nations

Reflections on Media in Canadian Fiction

by David Williams

tagged: canadian
Description

In Imagined Nations David Williams explores works by authors such as Alistair MacLeod, Michael Ondaatje, and Timothy Findley, examining the ways in which these writers show how our sense of time and space and our sense of personal and national identities have been altered by changes in modes of communication. He discusses how they have dramatized a series of shifts from the oral clan to the nation of the book (Alistair MacLeod), from print-nationalism to radio-confederacy (Wayne Johnston), and from print-stasis to an electronic space of flows (Michael Ondaatje). Some writers have resisted the threat of filmic images to print-formed communities (Timothy Findley, Guy Vanderhaeghe), while others have sought release from the prison of print (Hubert Aquin), or attempted to infiltrate cyberspace in the border war against globalization (William Gibson). Building on the work of Harold Innis, Williams joins other Canadians such as Marshall McLuhan, Ronald Deibert, and Gerald Friesen in extending and clarifying our understanding of the way differing media environments predispose us to imagine unique forms of political community.

About the Author
David Williams is professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba.
Contributor Notes

David Williams is professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba.

Editorial Review

"Original and thought-provoking. I am impressed by the way Williams draws on theory without being overwhelmed by it, and by the way he seeks a balanced view of the merits of each mode. He does not succumb to the nostalgia of orality, or to the revolutionary promise of the computer matrix." Jonathan Kertzer, Department of English, University of Calgary

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